Walmart vs. the World: Putting one of the worst climate criminals on trial!

This Black Friday join the Movement Generation Justice & Ecology Project to condemn Walmart as one of the planet's worst climate criminals, destroying land & life from Richmond to Bangladesh. We'll stand side-by-side with Walmart workers organizing for $15/hour, full-time work, and the respect they deserve. There will be political theatre, hands-on art, DJs, & food!

Walmart’s war on workers is a war on planet Earth. Walmart has tried to salvage their tarnished reputation through greenwashing. But no amount of rooftop solar or energy efficient refrigerators can conceal the fact that Walmart is one of the planet’s worst climate criminals. Walmart’s business model - worker exploitation, intensive resource extraction, globalized production and distribution, rampant consumerism, ruthless supplier competition, and subversion of our democracy - is at war with life on Earth.

In 2012, Walmart generated $16 billion in profit. The Walton family is worth $145 billion. These unprecedented profits have been extracted from the uncompensated labor of its workers at every stage of its global chain of production, as well as from the natural world. It is this extreme concentration of wealth wielded like a chainsaw against the natural world which is at the root of the ecological crisis:

Walmart exploits workers worldwide. Walmart’s chain of production is a chain of exploitation - Thousands of subcontracted workers in Bangladesh risk and lose their lives stitching “lowest price” garments, which are moved across the country by subcontracted port truck drivers, dubbed “sweatshops on wheels,” and sold by Walmart retail associates making poverty wages.

Walmart has a massive ecological footprint. Walmart’s endless rows of plastic products and electronics demand ever intensifying oil and mineral extraction. Their stores are a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. And Walmart’s globalized supply chain model makes it the largest importer of containerized ocean cargo in the U.S., one of the leading sources of pollution.

Walmart destroys local, living economies. Walmart actively drives out of business smaller, public transit-friendly, and environmentally-sustainable neighborhood retail districts, public markets, and “mom and pop” stores to make way for its highly-polluting, land-intensive, auto-oriented stores. Its impoverishment of workers and communities then guarantees customers too poor to shop anywhere else.

Walmart undermines our democracy. Walmart’s PAC funnels millions of dollars to climate deniers and other lawmakers on the wrong side of climate policy - backing the Keystone XL pipeline, supporting subsidies for big oil, blocking the EPA’s ability to regulate CO2 emissions, and protecting the fracking industry from regulation. Walmart’s funds to ALEC support mass incarceration when Walmart is committing the real crime of creating poverty and pollution.